


Butcherbird

by Theoroark



Series: Nobody's Fault [6]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Ana's "Zuko Alone" Episode, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Missing Scene, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Canon, Suicidal Ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-15
Updated: 2018-09-15
Packaged: 2019-07-12 17:08:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15999623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Theoroark/pseuds/Theoroark
Summary: She tells the nurse that she's taking a taxi back to her husband, that he's waiting for her back home. She doesn't think they believe her but she knows everyone was unnerved by the presence of a woman with a sniper round in her eye staying at their hospital. So they let her leave without a fuss. She doesn't have any money and she barely knows anything about Krakow. It's fall and all she has is a long sleeved t shirt, fatigues, and boots. The city is cold and everything is flat now.-Ana's time as The Shrike.





	Butcherbird

When she leaves the hospital, she doesn't know what to do with herself.  
  
She tells the nurse that she's taking a taxi back to her husband, that he's waiting for her back home. She doesn't think they believe her but she knows everyone was unnerved by the presence of a woman with a sniper round in her eye staying at their hospital. So they let her leave without a fuss. She doesn't have any money and she barely knows anything about Krakow. She had shed her Overwatch insignia-ed greatcoat when she heard people approaching her position, and the hospital pointedly did not give her back her body armor. It's fall and all she has is a long sleeved t shirt, fatigues, and boots. The city is cold and everything is flat now.  
  
She walks, because she doesn't know what else to do.  
  
When night falls, she takes a cardboard box someone's left near a dumpster and breaks it down. For the first time in decades, she's having to remember her survival training. She's got something between her and the ground, now. That's good. She positions herself between the dumpster and the corner of the alley, so she can keep an eye on her one point of exposure.  
  
Well, second point, her sniper training reminders her. She's still vulnerable from above. She rolls on her back and looks up at the small dark windows that dot the side of the building. She'd like to be up high. She'd feel safer up there. But she doesn't think that's an option.  
  
She touches her eyepatch and smiles ruefully. In any case, she thinks her sniping days are behind her.  
  
She's truly exhausted and so she manages to fall asleep eventually. But she wakes up to a rat crawling on her. She slams her hand down on her hip– misses the thing, in retrospect a piece of good luck, she doesn't need an infected bite on top of everything else. The rat scurries off and Ana picks up her piece of cardboard. Dumpster might not have been the best choice.  
  
She's walking through the back streets when she hears the faint sound of metal hitting pavement. It's a sound straight from the Crisis, it jolts any sleep left straight out of her system and tenses every muscle in her body. Then she hears another dull clang and she remembers the world's changed. She starts to move towards the sound, as quietly as she can.  
  
She finds them around the corner. Two humans, one with a bat, beating up an Omnic. They're curled up, cradling their head to protect the delicate processor stored within. The humans seem drunk, but they're young and armed and there's two of them. Ana would have to be stupid to take them on.  
  
But what does she have to lose, anymore?  
  
She steps out of the shadows. The two humans turn to stare at her. She doesn't speak Polish, so she just slides her hand across her throat.  
  
The human with a bat takes a step towards her and yells something in Polish. Their comrade is holding the Omnic down and staring at her warily. The one with the bat takes another step towards her, waving the bat, and Ana sees her opening.  
  
She charges into them, slamming all her weight into their exposed core. They fall down with a wheeze and the bat slips from their grip. Before they even register the loss, Ana has it in her hands and brings it down on their temple. Blood wells up and their eyes roll back. She stands up, holding the bat at the ready. The other person is holding something out to her, and it takes her a minute to realize it's their wallet. She looks down at the Omnic. They've raised their head up an inch, the yellow lights of their eyes just visible past their hands.  
  
She looks back at the human and beckons. They toss their wallet at her feet and start to run, but Ana says "Stop," and they screech to a halt. When they turn back to face her, she points at the Omnic and slices their hand across her throat. They nod vigorously and run.  
  
Ana crouches down next to the unconscious person and starts rummaging through their pockets. She pulls out their wallet and is in the process of discarding their IDs and health care cards at their side when she hears, "Thank you." She looks up and the Omnic is standing above her, hands clasped.  
  
"We aren't allowed to carry money," they say. "But I can give you a place to stay for the night, if you want."  
  
Ana runs.  
  
She finds a grocery store first, because she's incredibly hungry. The staff watch her closely and she's suddenly very aware she hasn't showered in coming on two days. She finds the first pull-top soup can she can, pays for four, and hurries out. She walks a block away, sits on a bench, and eats two right away. She finds a charity clothing store and gets a hoodie there. She tries not to be reminded of Gabriel. Then she goes to a liquor store and buys a handle of cheap vodka. She finds another bench and drinks and cries, unable to truly distract herself from the fact that she has half the tears she used to. She doesn't know what she's doing here. She cut herself out from everyone she loved. Her remaining feels utterly superfluous. Her empty eye socket hurts, her heart hurts, everything hurts.  
  
But that Omnic wasn't hurt tonight. And so she feels better than she has in a long time.  
  
-  
  
She has to get to Egypt. She knows it's not going to change anything. But she knows Egypt and she knows she needs to be some kind of home.  
  
She's not going to buy a transcontinental train ticket with two wallets, though. And she's not particularly inclined to finance her travel through mugging. Luckily, the wallets have opened some doors for her.  
  
She uses the pass from one of them and takes a bus downtown. It takes her a bit to find it. She remembered the neighborhood, but not the street or the building. But finally, she touches the door of an old townhouse and a small black, white, and red insignia lights up on the door knob.  
  
Gabriel's notified of every usage of a Blackwatch safehouse. Unless someone with higher clearance than him cancels that command. She hopes she entered in her access code before he got pinged. She supposes she'll find out, she thinks, as she lets herself in and quickly closes the door behind her. If Gabriel has her narrowed down to a city, he'll be on her in an instant.  
  
She doesn't want to be caught, she reminds herself.  
  
The Blackwatch safehouse has everything she could have hoped for, which is both difficult and irritating, as she can't exactly judge Gabriel for this now, now can she. She takes a sniper rifle from the armory rack, refits herself with body armor. She even treats herself to one of their more experimental pieces of tech, a navy blue cloak textured to best camouflage the user in urban combat. Then she sits down at the terminal and pulls up a map of Talon activity.  
  
She knew there were things Gabriel wasn't telling her and Jack, but she's floored by the scope of his omissions. Talon has military grade bases in every country in the region. They have infiltrated every government to some degree. They are perfectly positioned to take over.  
  
But they haven't, she thinks. She's known Gabriel long enough to know this is why he hasn't told them. He wants to come to them with full intel of Talon's end goal, a complete plan, knowing every move on the chessboard three steps in advance. But it still hurts. She still wonders if there was something she could have done to earn his trust again.  
  
She shakes her head. If she starts thinking about them, she'll be lost. She just needs to get home. Which reminds her. She moves down the map to Egypt.  
  
It's less inundated than Europe, but Talon is still very much there. She hovers her cursor over the big red hotspot in Giza. She remembers during the crisis, the god program there reduced the entire city to rubble. It's only just started to rebuild. She clicks on the point. Stills of Talon operatives around the compound pop up, as well as a large link to St. Petersburg. "Traces of communication between Volskaya Industries employees and Giza-based Talon operatives," reads Gabriel's note on the link. Ana turns the rifle over in her hands and smiles.  
  
The trains to St. Petersburg have relatively light security.  
  
-  
  
Before she goes, she grabs information on the St. Petersburg underworld from the Blackwatch database. Scanning through it, she's hit with something she's overlooked: she could easily be recognized. And Captain Amari of the world's largest military organization is unlikely to be trusted.  
  
She finds a mask among the kit. It glows in three red bars and that might as well be her sending up a flare for Gabriel to come find her. After some tinkering, she manages to rewire it. She turns the glow blue and rearranges the bars so they mirror the shape of her scope crosshair. When she puts it on, the shadows in the room become lighter.  
  
It doesn't give her back her eye, though. She's still getting used to her lack of depth perception. Standing near the rails, waiting to jump the train, she finds she's not nervous, per se, but... something. Like she knows that if she doesn't make it, she'll have a moment of disappointment before she's mangled and dies. That's more than she's been able to say in a while, even if she can't put a name to the feeling. It can't be hope.  
  
In any case, she makes the jump.  
  
When she gets to St. Petersburg, she finds a man named Black Wolf. Blackwatch files had marked him down as a potential asset– he's an arms dealer whose business has been quashed by Talon's encroachment. The reason he wasn't cultivated, his file notes, is because he was not personally very capable.  
  
Ana is, though. She goes to his office and informs him that they have mutual interests. That if he's willing to compensate her appropriately, they could arrange something that worked well for both of them.  
  
Black Wolf leans back in his chair. "And how do I know you'll be able to deliver?" he asks.  
  
Ana walks to his window and lifts up her rifle. It's her first time firing it with one eye, her first time in a long time firing without her bionic eye. She can feel a barely controlled tremor under her skin. She doesn't know if she can still do this.  
  
She hits a squirrel racing across a power line a block away. Black Wolf looks her over.  
  
"Sokolov," he says. "Weapons engineer at Volskaya. He'll be conducting a survey of the mechs tomorrow. That'll be your best window."  
  
She finds the service entrance with little problem and positions herself in a high window. Blackwatch's habit of collecting data illegally might have caused some of her worse migraines, but she has to admit she's grateful for the schematics she pulled from their system.  
  
After an hour of waiting, Sokolov emerges from the office building. He strides through the work yard flanked by assistants. Ana fixes him in her crosshairs and–  
  
–remembers countless faces going shocked and still, remembers countless voices screaming around them, remembers countless notches on her rifle, defeating the whole point of the exercise, remembers her enemies sobbing over the countless corpses of her targets–  
  
She rolls over to the wall. Closes her eye. Remembers the faces of the scant number of refugees that made it out of Giza. A woman who sat in the corner, rigid, unwilling to eat or drink or move. Eventually, they found a neighbor, and pieced together what had happened. She had escaped. Her child had not.  
  
"I left him," the woman said to her, when Ana went to comfort her. "I knew he would die and I left him, so I could save myself."  
  
Ana gets back into position and fires. It's a swift, clean shot. No lingering, no hopeless flights to the hospital. He's dead before he hits the ground. She's up and running before the alarms start ringing.  
  
She makes it out unscathed. She finds Black Wolf in a bar he told her about. He's already heard, and holds out his arms in an open hug. She folds her arms and hopes her unamused expression is conveyed through the mask.  
  
Evidentially, it is, because he lowers his arms and chuckles. "Straight the point, then," he says, and holds out her briefcase. She scans the bar for any suspicious activity and seeing none takes it and discreetly counts the bills. When she's satisfied, she stands to leave.  
  
"A pleasure doing business with you," Black Wolf says. "What's your name, anyway? In case we want to do business again."  
  
Ana wants to tell him that's not happening, that he's one to talk about names. Instead, she just tells him, "Shrike," and leaves.  
  
-  
  
On the train to Cairo, she thinks about her answer. The birds were everywhere in Europe. It's not that strange they were on her mind. Her codename in the army was "Horus," after all. She's used to an avian motif.  
  
But there's a bit of a difference between a falcon god and a creature nicknamed "butcherbird." Ana remembers reading about how shrikes would impale their prey on thorns and spikes and then just leave them, little caches of meat for a rainy day. Black Wolf's cash is lining her pockets and she laughs.  
  
-  
  
She gets to Egypt and she stays there. She’s there when the Swiss base goes up.

 

She hears about it when she’s walking down the street, in an overheard conversation. They just said explosion, and so she argued with her panic. No matter how bad things had gotten, Gabriel and Jack would not be foolish enough to die so violently and senselessly. Not after everything they had fought for.

 

She ducks into a quiet side street and flips on her holovid and checks the news. The headline is there, waiting for her, taking up the entire page: “JACK MORRISON AND GABRIEL REYES CONFIRMED TO BE IS ZURICH BASE EXPLOSION, PRESUMED DEAD.”

 

Ana puts the holovid down next to her. She stares down the street. She can hear a TV through one of the apartment windows and there’s an Omnic a couple doors down wrestling to open the door with their arms full of boxes.

 

She doesn’t believe they’re gone.

 

She could make a logical argument for that belief, albeit a poor one. Jack and Gabriel were designed to survive anything. “Presumed dead” is how her condition was described, she’s sure. There aren’t any bodies.

 

But the main reason she doesn’t believe it is because she can’t. Gabriel and Jack were there for her for some of the darkest moments of her life, and even when they weren’t she still loved them. She would sit in her room and drink and stew about how they always came to her with their bitching about each other, but they didn’t notice how she would get to work late and how she disappeared right after the funerals they attended. But she still loved them. They’re a part of her heart. She can’t believe they’re gone. She doesn’t want to.

 

The next day, she breaks into a military base and copies their files on Talon. A soldier catches her and tries to stop her and she beats him until he’s bloody.

 

Distantly, she thinks it’s a gross kind of funny. She hurts all the time and she’s lost so much. The only strength she has left is that she has nothing left to lose. And she just keeps getting stronger.

 

-

 

She reads about Fareeha’s wedding in the paper.

 

She and Angela took out an announcement, a small thing, a quick blurb and a little photo of the two of them in the park, hugging pit bulls, dogs and women alike wearing big smiles. Ana cries the hardest she has in years.

 

This isn’t what she wanted. She wanted to dance with her daughter at her wedding. She wanted to hold her grandchild, or granddog, whatever made Fareeha happy. She wanted a good life for Fareeha.

 

But Fareeha’s at Helix, and so Ana fears for her with every breath she takes. But some horrible part of her is almost grateful for that. Because if she weren’t at Helix, then Fareeha’s life would be good. And that would be proof that Fareeha’s life is good without her.

 

Ana goes to the public library and prints out a copy of the wedding announcement. She sticks it under the hologram of 8-year-old Fareeha and only looks at it when she feels strong enough.

  
-

About a year later, Jack’s “Wanted” posters go up.

 

She recognizes him right away, though that’s not something she can take any pride in. He’s calling himself by his SEP ID. He may as well have sent a selfie to every person in the know in the world. She doesn’t know what the hell he’s going for, but it isn’t subtlety.

 

And that, too, would be evident without any special knowledge. She almost laughs at his shiny jacket and oversized gun. Back in the Strike Team days, Gabriel would always make them watch _Saving Private Ryan_ on movie nights, Jack would always make them watch _Rambo_ , she would always call them idiots for picking wars movies on their time off. It looks like at least two of them haven’t changed a bit.

 

She considers that. Back at Overwatch, Jack was a bureaucratic major political figure, and he’s running around like he’s a renegade everyman. He looks ridiculous. But it occurs to her that he has, in fact, made a change.

  
She looks down at herself. She hasn't changed. She's still killing. She's just lost everything that made that killing bearable. She tells herself she has nothing left to lose but that's not true, is it, the hurt's still there, she just can't conceive of ever losing it.  
  
"I don't want to hurt anymore," she tells the Jack on the poster. He stares back at her impassively through his red visor.  
  
-  
  
She finds an abandoned Watchpoint, dusts off a computer, and downloads the schematics to the biotic rifle onto her holovid. She sets up a news alert for Soldier: 76 and starts a map of his activities. He'll come to Egypt eventually, she thinks, as she soldiers away at her work bench, filling up bullets with life. If she doesn't find him, he'll find her.  
  
She has hope.  
  
She writes Fareeha a letter.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm @tacticalgrandma on tumblr/twitter if you want to talk to me there!
> 
> Thank you so much for reading, and any comments/kudos would mean the world to me <3


End file.
